Napoleon of the piano
Leon Plantinga
THE VIRTUOSO LISZT. By Dana Gooley. 280pp. CambridgeUniversity Press. £45 (US $75). - 0 521 83443 0
Mania and militarism in the life of Liszt
Franz Liszt, still often thought the greatest of all pianists, made his mark as an international virtuoso mainly during a period of less than a decade. From
1838 to 1847 he criss-crossed Europe with frenetic energy, presenting more than
1,000 concerts from Madrid to St Petersburg, from Constantinople to Manchester.
Heads of state conferred on him singular honours: the Order of Carlos II in Madrid, the Order of the Lion of Belgium in Brussels, the "sabre of honour" in Pest, and (perhaps with rather different implications ) two trained bears from Tsar Nicholas I in St Petersburg. Tumultuous ovations greeted him almost everywhere. In 1838, a series of six concerts in Vienna became ten by popular demand; Berlin in 1841-2 enjoyed a ten-week stretch of twenty-one concerts, filled to overflowing, at which Liszt performed some eighty works.
Especially in that city, Liszt seems to have aroused a kind of hysteria, for which Heine coined a name, "Lisztomanie". Well- situated women collected the pianist's hair- clippings, it was said, and wore his discarded cigar butts on their persons; he received the Ordre Pour le Merite, and departed the city along Unter den Linden in a procession of thirty carriages drawn by white horses, as the King and Queen of Prussia waved from a palace window. The press in many cities -with Paris in the lead -offered detailed reports of these adventures, sometimes with a strong dose of sarcasm, and cartoonists everywhere rejoiced.
What was it about Liszt's playing and person that stirred such excitement? He was but one of many piano virtuosi, most of them also born in Central or Eastern Europe and operating mainly out of Paris, which, after the July Days of
1830, had once again become the European centre of fashion for everything from music to couture and cuisine. Except for Chopin, these other pianists have largely slipped into obscurity: Henri Herz, Theodor Doehler, Johann Peter Pixis, even Liszt's chief rival, Sigismund Thalberg, who in 1837 competed with him in a celebrated piano "duel" at the Paris salon of the colourful Italian emigree Princess Cristina Belgiojoso-Trivulzio (said to have entertained both Heinrich Heine and the aged General Lafayette in her boudoir). All these pianists toured widely and successfully; Herz travelled even more widely than Liszt, performing in South America in 1845 and shortly thereafter in some 400 concerts in the United States.
Nor did their repertories greatly differ: all offered standard favourites by contemporary composers such as Weber and Hummel, together with a good many of their own compositions, prominent among them the fantasies and variations on favourite melodies from current operas.
(Schumann, who detested the genre, once referred to such variations as a tune in "four or five successive states of watery decomposition".) Liszt added to his programmes works of older composers, and piano paraphrases of songs and symphonies, but this does not seem to account for the extremes of audience reaction.
Liszt's technical wizardry at the keyboard -perhaps even more striking in his improvisations than in the published scores -surely played a major role in catapulting him to fame. In his paraphrase of Schubert's "Erlkonig" he added terrifying octave-doublings of the scales in the left hand to the notoriously exhausting repeated right-hand octaves of the original. And he came up with novel keyboard effects such as the simulation of a chromatic glissando -a manifest impossibility -with a glissando on the white keys in one hand together with a parallel scale on the black ones in the other. But all the piano virtuosi had their own tricks. Thalberg popularized a keyboard texture in which the melody in a middle register, in single notes or octaves, was festooned with arpeggios and other figurations above and below, resulting in a powerful reinforcement of the melody's upper partials and a sonority of singular resonance.
It sounded, said the critics, as if Thalberg had (at least) three hands, and the cartoonists again had a fine time of it. All the other virtuosi, including Liszt, soon used this keyboard texture and made it routine (a tame example is the main theme of Liebestraum No 3, which, though a transcription of a song, is one of Liszt's best-known piano pieces).
But there was clearly something more about Liszt's concerts, about his very presence in a city, that caused a stir; he had about him a charisma and drama that seldom failed to touch a nerve. Attempts to describe this effect resorted to metaphors of war, intimations of the demonic, or uneasy thoughts about psycho- sexual forces. This, the vivid and composite image that attached to Liszt as he made his triumphant rounds, is the subject of Dana Gooley's engaging book, The Virtuoso Liszt. The reader will find little here about music and not very much about its performance. This is a study of "reception", of the social, political and psychological factors at work in image-making, and of Liszt's sometimes active, sometimes almost unwitting, participation in the process. Gooley tells us in his afterword that he began with the idea of studying how Liszt may have anticipated the modern "popular star" -presumably of the movie or rock varieties. But a closer inquiry into the historical background of the phenomenon led him to conclude that Liszt's "popularity rested on unfamiliar premises quite specific to the 1830s and 1840s". This was a reasonable conclusion, surely, and Gooley's book profits greatly from his determination to understand historical context, and from his industry in seeking out the supporting sources.
The author pays close attention to only a limited part of the already short period of Liszt's greatest triumphs: the antecedent events in Paris in the later 1830s, with extended analysis of the Liszt-Thalberg rivalry; the pianist's return to an adoring Hungary in 1839-40; and the furore in Berlin of
1841-2. Within these contexts Gooley focuses in turn on a series of central themes: the roles of various Parisian social strata in championing Liszt or his main rival, the political forces at work in the Hungarians' gleeful appropriation of this virtuoso of ambiguous nationality, socio-political factors that spurred the hyperventilating ovations in Berlin, and a perception of Liszt as a servant of charitable causes.
Sigismund Thalberg, a pianist of uncertain origins -though reputedly of noble but illegitimate birth -burst on the Paris scene at the end of 1835 and was quickly hailed in some quarters as the world's foremost piano virtuoso. Liszt, then in Geneva with the Countess Marie d'Agoult, probably had not yet heard Thalberg play, but responded all the same with a long and damaging article about his compositions in the Paris Revue et gazette musicale. Thus began a rivalry, much inflamed by the press, that culminated in the duel staged in 1837 by the Princess Belgiojoso. Its outcome has been variously assessed, but what everyone remembered was the Princess's airy bon mot, "Thalberg is the first pianist in the world; Liszt is the only one". Gooley convincingly describes these events as disturbances of a distinct "masterplan" which Liszt had formulated for his career in the mid-1830s: a determination to limit his public playing for a time so as to distinguish himself first as a composer and man of letters, thereby putting some necessary distance between himself and the other pianists, before launching his true career as a virtuoso. Thalberg's alarming rise to prominence cut these plans short, and hastened the launch of Liszt's own concert tours.
Gooley portrays the two virtuosi as starkly different in style and image.
Thalberg, the favourite of the dilettante aristocracy addicted to opera at the Theatre des Italiens, worked his wonders at the keyboard with an air of tasteful restraint and good manners. Liszt, who appealed greatly to intellectuals and artists, was, as Gooley says, given to the large gesture: "In performance he stamped his feet, lifted his arms far above the keyboard, and on the whole denied his body a stable centre of gravity".
Critics were quick to associate his manner at the keyboard with the excesses of French Romanticism, with Liszt's alliances among litterateurs, artists and musicians such as Balzac, Hugo, George Sand, Delacroix and Berlioz. Liszt's playing was heard as exhilaratingly dramatic, filled with abrupt, unpredictable shifts of style and affect; Thalberg's performances seemed, like the pianist, subject to rational order. Gooley finds these contrasting impressions reflected in contemporary portraits of the two men. A sculpture of Thalberg by Jean-Pierre Dantan the younger shows the virtuoso with a very prominent, neatly coiffed head, but no fewer than twenty fingers, all somehow well under control.
The same artist's familiar sculpture of Liszt is dominated by the pianist's oversized mane in full flight, with virtually no head in view.
If Liszt's playing seemed scattered and histrionic, the central impression left by Thalberg's pianism, Gooley insists (largely dismissing the common multi fingered and -handed image), was "vocality", a vivid imitation of the human voice. But the author sometimes takes the choice of words in his sources too literally, inscribing metaphor into stone. Comparison with the singing voice was one of various figures of speech writers seized on in the effort to describe a musical effect. In 1836, the Paris critic Henri Blanchard, for example, declared that "No one else has ever sung at the piano like Thalberg.
His sound is sustained . . .
such that one imagines oneself to be hearing the expressive bow of (Alexandre) Batta gliding gracefully upon the strings of his cello". Liszt, by contrast, was frequently portrayed as a conquering military hero, a new Caesar, Alexander, or - especially in France -a Napoleon entering a city in triumph and commanding his troops (the orchestra) to a conclusive musical victory that often involved some destruction of the piano. Liszt's repertory reinforced this impression: a favourite "warhorse" pressed into service in his campaign was Weber's Konzertstuck for piano and orchestra, its grand military march made all the grander in Liszt's arrangement.
The military theme took on a different colouring during Liszt's visit to Hungary in 1839-40. Though born in that country (of German- speaking parents), he had as an adolescent taken up residence in Paris, and had never thought of himself as Hungarian, nor spoken the language. Yet on Liszt's first visit to that country since childhood, the conservative Magyar political forces, aflame with nationalist enthusiasms, hailed him as a national hero and conferred on him the sabre of honour. Gooley claims to be the first to disentangle the roles of the various competing factions in Liszt's Hungarian reception, and thus to clarify its larger political implications. In a wider context, the conferral of the sabre turned out to be, well, something of a double-edged sword: papers in Paris and Vienna saw it as a repudiation of Liszt's supposed loyalties to both the French and the Germans -for they, too, had claimed him -and of liberal progressivism in favour of a narrow, backward-looking militaristic movement in a marginal land. But the cartoonists, at least, could now picture him seated at the piano with the formidable weapon dangling from his belt.
Liszt's re-engagement with Hungary had actually begun with the Vienna concert series of 1838, put on for the benefit of flood victims in Pest. This was one of many contributions he made to charitable causes, including benefits for the completion of Cologne Cathedral and for establishing the BeethovenMonument in Bonn. Gooley devotes a good bit of space to Liszt as philanthropist, but doubts his good intentions:
Liszt was capitalizing on charity the same way he capitalized on the cult of Napoleon or on opera melodies from Don Giovanni and Robert le Diable. He identified a disposition embedded in the minds and emotions of the contemporary publics, and generated public support by addressing his virtuosity to that disposition.
Surely this is too harsh. Liszt seems in general to have been a benevolent sort, who responded with sympathy in situations where he had nothing to gain.
He was known for his generosity to fellow musicians, including the very difficult Wagner who showed up on his doorstep in Weimar after participating in the Dresden insurrection of 1849. If anything, Liszt sometimes lent himself to causes, such as the nebulous projects of the Saint-Simonians in Paris and the special interests of his hosts in Pest, without sufficient discernment.
When Liszt arrived in Berlin in 1841, the city was brimming with opposing political and social factions. In a volatile Vormarz climate a conservative militarist aristocracy confronted Junges Deutschland and proto-Socialist groups anticipating the revolutions of 1848-9. A new king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, yearned nostalgically for the German Middle Ages and for monarchy by divine sanction. A central project of his was state-sponsored high culture; an appeal, that is, to the best instincts of the citizenry, to the hallowed concept of Bildung. To this end, the Court underwrote revivals of Sophocles and Shakespeare, summoning Ludwig Tieck to ensure authentic staging, and Mendelssohn to provide fitting incidental music. It seems emblematic of the times that, for the inaugural university lecture by the idealist Friedrich Schelling (another recent import), both Friedrich Engels and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin were in attendance.
Gooley shows how Liszt and the Berlin populace needed to re-interpret the composer's usual public persona. Since the pianist as a new Napoleon would hardly do, his admirers saw him more as Frederick the Great, or maybe Frederick's nephew, Louis Ferdinand, the soldier- musician who fell at the Battle of Saalfeld.
But Gooley's sketch of the political and social climate surrounding the virtuoso in the Prussian capital is less satisfying than his assessment of the situation in Paris and Budapest. His analysis, focused almost exclusively on the extremes of the Berliners' adulation, takes pretty much at face value the bilious (but delightful) animadversions of Heine, who viewed the events from Paris. Following Heine and the radical Frankfurt critic Ernst Dronke, Dana Gooley sees in Berlin a communal illness, a psychological affliction brought on by political repression and paralysing social regimentation. He cites Habermas's diagnosis of the underlying problem: the lack, as yet, of a "bourgeois public sphere". But this is much too facile. Absence of a "bourgeois public sphere" still prevailed in most European cities for most of the nineteenth century -which is Habermas's point -and Liszt's reception in Berlin differed from that elsewhere more in degree than in kind. Furthermore, the city received him with relative indifference on his return in 1843, when neither Liszt nor the social order could have changed much, and Berliners would scarcely have had time to recover from their "disease".
The Virtuoso Liszt is not free of critical jargon, most evident when the matter at hand touches directly on the interests of other critics and theoreticians.
Novel verbs, "to thematize" and "delegitimate", join a repertory that includes "to emblematize", "to gender", "to code" (as in "both were coded Parisian"), and "to construct" ("writers at the Humorist, then, constructed Liszt as a German"). The gestures and motions of a performing virtuoso, as well as the comportment of the audience, occasion talk of that favoured object of critical discourse: "the body". But in the end these are minor disturbances in a responsible piece of historical and interpretative writing, a valuable contribution to our understanding of Liszt and the forces that made his remarkable career possible.